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Weasels in the Attic: Hiroko Oyamada

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What have I contemplated though? I'm not sure I'm getting it. This sounds like a collection of carelessly chosen phrases that failed to convey any figurative meaning. Similar to the denouement —there have been numerous interpretive deconstructions because it was so unconstrained, consequently made the novella appears to be as obscure as its subject matter. Is it about patriarchy? motherhood? or simply weasels in the attic? I guess I'll never catch it. As in Oyamada’s earlier novels, Weasels in the Attic lingers on the grotesqueries of everyday life with a subtle, deadpan humour." Metropolis Japan

Weasels in the Attic - Kindle edition by Oyamada, Hiroko

The third story is more or less the same scenario, only a bit later. Yoko, Saiki’s wife, has had a baby, with the help of the narrator’s wife. This time we see that Saiki has once again shown an interest in fish and now has several fish tanks with discus fish and one with the rare bonytongue. As it is snowing, the narrator and his wife have to spend the night and they sleep in the room with the fish tanks. Bonytongues can jump three feet. BOOK REVIEW: VERA WONG’S UNSOLICITED ADVICE FOR MURDERERS (2023) BY JESSE SUTANTO – A WHOLESOME INVESTIGATION OF THE UNCONVENTIONAL My grandpa carried the cage over to the trash can and dunked it in the water…. When he did I heard the most horrible sound…. It was this series of piercing shrieks. I’d never heard anything like it before – and I haven’t heard it since, not once. The weasel was screaming with everything it had.

If it were typical slice of life, I would have expected more (or any) character quirks, witty dialogue, societal satire, or social commentary. At least a unique perspective on life. Needless to say, none of these things were on offer here.

Weasels in House? (Helpful Guide and Facts) How to Get Rid Of Weasels in House? (Helpful Guide and Facts)

Clearly fertility is the key theme, Both Urabe and Saiki have shown little interest in marriage and sex but, when they do marry, a child is produced fairly promptly, while our narrator and his wife struggle throughout the book to have a child, though the fact that they are older may be an issue. The fish and weasels seem to have few problems in this area. Behind all these meeting and strange happenings with tropical fish and weasel infestations there is the growing concern of the narrator that he might never become a father, would he be a good father and is it really what he wants. His desires and concerns are echoed in the odd situations and his dreams. This "novel" is comprised of 3 brief, well-written, connected short stories, each with a seemingly different focus: 1) high-end fish collecting; 2) Weasels at friend's new house; 3) friend and new bride's new baby, and high-end fish and fish tanks in the guest bedroom. Is there a larger through-line here? I'm not going to say no. Our protagonist and his wife are trying to get pregnant...kind of. They're going through the motions of getting tested, etc., and she seems to have a deep affection for the friend's new baby. The solution for the weasels in the second story, brought to light by the protagonist's wife (that of drowning a female weasel so the other weasels will hear its warning screams) was disturbing. That the friends never had a weasel problem again and it was all thanks to her was also disturbing but thankfully occurred "off-screen."Over dinner at Saiki’s house, a grotesquely rich boar stew, the narrator’s wife recalls that during her childhood, her parents also had a weasel problem. The infestation got so bad that a putrid liquid began dripping from the attic. She too developed a rash, all over her body. Her father and grandfather set a trap and soon caught one—an adult female. “Great,” announced her grandmother. “We got one of the parents.” But the weasel didn’t look like an adult. It was very cute: covered in golden fur, with little ears, a flat snout, and tiny legs that wriggled about in the cage. She wanted to keep it as a pet. One of Oyamada’s skills is that while, on the face of it, things seem straightforward, she puts in many little episodes that are more disturbing. Why and how did Urabe die and why did he die seemingly alone? There is the issue of the removal technique of the weasels by the narrator’s wife’s family, the eating of the fish food and the associated story,the role of the slightly odd neighbour of Saiki and Yoko and the behaviour of the fish, particularly the jumping bonytongue. All give us a sense that things are not quite as they should be The English-language debut of one of Japan’s most exciting new writers, The Factory follows three workers at a sprawling industrial factory. Each worker focuses intently on the specific task they’ve been assigned: one shreds paper, one proofreads documents, and another studies the moss growing all over the expansive grounds. But their lives slowly become governed by their work—days take on a strange logic and momentum, and little by little, the margins of reality seem to be dissolving: Where does the factory end and the rest of the world begin? What’s going on with the strange animals here? And after a while—it could be weeks or years—the three workers struggle to answer the most basic question: What am I doing here? As their identities erode, so does their work: technical documents reviewed by the copyeditor disintegrate, merging into his own stream of consciousness. Time blurs accordingly. Oyamada flits between disparate events, months or years apart, from paragraph to paragraph, without transition or comment. Though it seems as if the events of the novel unfold over the first few weeks after the workers are hired, it later becomes clear that fifteen years have drifted by. by commentators, guest bloggers, reviewers, and interviewees are solely their own and do not reflect the opinions of Locus magazine or its staff.

Weasels in the Attic by Hiroko Oyamada, David Boyd - Waterstones

In the first story, The Narrator and Saiki visit a friend of Saiki called Urabe who lives above a failed pet shop with a lot of tropical fish. When they arrive, the two men find that Urabe is not only married but has a baby too, something Saiki was not aware of. As we know Urabe has died, the narrator and his wife are still trying for a baby. Saiki, however, has, to the narrator’s surprise, has got married. As he works from home, he has moved to the country, which he is beginning to regret, particularly as the eponymous weasels are getting into his attic. He traps them and dumps them fifteen miles away but still they come. Make sure that the hardware cloth holes are no larger than ½ inch; if it is, the weasel will get through. Take Preventative MeasuresTheir slender bodies and fine fur creates a serious issue: excess loss of body heat. Weasels manage this potential defeat by consuming around 40 percent of their own body weight in one day! At the Edge of the Woods by Masatsugu Ono, translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter, is about a father parenting through an apocalypse in the absence of his pregnant wife. Alternatively, Diary of a Void by Emi Yagi, translated (like Weasels) by David Boyd and co-translated by Lucy North, is about a woman who fakes a pregnancy to escape sexist expectations at work. Slated for release later this year, The Thorn Puller by Hiromi Ito, translated by Jeffrey Angles, is about a mother juggling children in the US and parents in Japan. Writing about parenthood isn’t new, of course: Woman Running in the Mountains by Yuko Tsushima, translated by Geraldine Harcourt, is an important four-decade-old novel about single motherhood reissued earlier this year. This book is comprised of three connected stories centred around meals shared between two friends. Fertility, motherhood and masculinity are the loose theme of the stories, however all three stories suffer from being underdeveloped and too brief. Ideas are touched upon... then the story is over. To say I didn't get much out of this would be an accurate summation. Perhaps I'll fare better with the author's other books.

Weasels in the Attic | The Modern Novel Oyamada: Weasels in the Attic | The Modern Novel

Hiroko Oyamada’s modus operandi is exploring the odd corners of modern Japan and she certainly does so, as the title immediately indicates. I cannot recall ever reading a book where weasels play a significant role.Weasels in the Attic is a novella composed of three stories originally published over a number of years. They’re all narrated by the same, unnamed man who is trying to come to terms with his wife’s desire to have children and his own uncertainties. Each story revolves around an encounter with another couple and their offspring, and highlights issues around marriage, parental responsibility and the ways in which social expectations impact on communication between men and women. Oyamada draws on animal symbolism from the “wily” weasel to human-animal relations played out in the depiction of tropical fish in two of these stories. Women, on the other hand, are less well realised, shadowy or peripheral figures, sometimes close to a form of commodity – the men seem obsessed with the fact that two of the wives here are younger than their male partners, significant for their status-enhancing potential rather than as individuals in their own right. Social interactions, even between friends, are represented as tense, awkward affairs, muffled and distant. Only animals are discussed or considered in any explicit detail, from the notoriously difficult to rear discus fish to the uncanny bony tongue, and the strangely unnerving weasels that infest one character’s supposedly ideal rural home. From the acclaimed author of The Hole and The Factory, a thrilling and mysterious novel that explores fertility, masculinity, and marriage in contemporary Japan The house and its environs become another factory, a world of its own, with its own code of secrecy. It is summertime, unbearably hot, and the neighbors are all exceedingly old. Asa never sees a cat, a dog, or even a bird. A river runs through the area, but it is choked with so much waste that it looks “like it was made of gelatin.” Nobody goes outside, at least not while the sun is up, apart from a band of feral children who gambol in the shadows, just out of view. Where are their parents? Do they have parents? American readers might be inclined to detect, in such exchanges, a criticism of Japanese culture. But Oyamada’s tone is never satirical or polemical—she is the anti–Ryu Murakami. She shies away from geographical and cultural references, apart from the obsessively, even luridly itemized meals. (Boyd, to his credit, doesn’t bother trying to translate terms like inarizushi, azuma, and okara, all of which are used to characterize the same dish.) Her worlds begin small and shrink—to the size of a cubicle, or a hole. A trap made just for me.

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